And You Have The Satire That Is Taken From Actors In The South And Taken From Writers In The North, Put Together In The Same Studio, And Then It Is Mixed Together With Formal Experimentation, And It Comes Out As Gapecast

It goes without saying that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected people socially in lots of different ways.  Some have put together a full schedule of evening Zoom calls of friends and family, others have eschewed this merry-go-round in favour of throwing themselves into their interests.  I’ve done a lot of gaming and got big into mahjong.  And a couple of folks out there decided to put together an outlandish audio drama series which ridicules the mores of the UK’s parliamentary and media landscapes in a way that uses obscene humour and constant formal experimentation to undercut accepted notions of what political comedy can be.  I’m very glad they did, as it’s been one of the best discoveries I’ve made during this godawful period in human history.

Gapecast is an offshoot of cult podcast Reel Politik, which combines political commentary with film and music criticism from an unashamedly hard-left, Corbynite standpoint.  RP host Jack Frayne-Reid plays the main character, a grotesque version of the former Labour MP for Ilford South and staunch Jeremy Corbyn critic, Mike Gapes.  Gapes is (or was) a veteran backbencher from the centrist “Trot-bashing” wing of Labour with a strong line in pro-NATO, pro-EU, anti-Russian interventionist foreign policy, who in recent years has found himself memed into a figure of fun by the Very Online Left as a result of a bizarre parliamentary speech in which he talked about milk being taken from the cows in the south and the cows in the north, after which it is mixed together with whiskey and subsequently comes out as Bailey’s.  (I think he was trying to make an analogy about Brexit, but I’ve honestly no idea.)  Early episodes were based around a series of demented monologues in which Gapes talked about political issues of the day, offered a guided tour of his home and detailed his upbringing, but the show’s remit soon expanded to incorporate a whole cast of characters.  The most important of these are Richard Miller, award-winning data journalist turned Gapes election agent and general dogsbody, and Jimothy Baker, an investigative reporter for the local newspaper.  These two are voiced by Gapecast’s lead writer, a pseudonymous figure who has gone by a number of online aliases but who is best known for their now-deleted Twitter account “Farage’s Fucked Face” (FFF for short).  While the characters are very different – Miller is a grimy figure who spends his time mired in the Dark Web and has a number of unsettling sexual fetishes, whereas Baker comes across as something of a naïf – their roles in Gapecast’s plot and the schemes of its titular protagonist both reflect Reel Politik’s preoccupation with the ways in which the news media, particularly liberal publications like the Guardian and the Observer, dovetailed with tenured centrist politicians such as Gapes to forestall and ultimately defeat the radical change embodied by the Corbyn movement.  Further to this end, fictionalised versions of other RP bêtes noires crop up throughout the show’s run, including but not limited to the politicians Chris Leslie and Wes Streeting, opinion columnists John Rentoul and John Harris, and particularly vociferously anti-Corbyn celebrities such as J.K. Rowling and Eddie Marsan.

Let me be clear: I’m not just a fan of Gapecast because I enjoy its use of Left Twitter in-jokes and I’m good friends with the head writer.  Don’t get me wrong, that helps, and it’s certainly easy to make fun of Gapes, with his nasal voice, bumptious rhetoric and ridiculous name.  But if all the show had to offer was jokes about milk, it would have got old quite quickly.  Gapecast’s complex and allusive imagined world succeeds in deconstructing and mocking the political tendencies of the UK in a way that other comedy broadcasts such as Have I Got News For You and Spitting Image struggle to do, because these shows long ago ceased to function as the kind of politically committed outsider art Gapecast entails, if indeed they ever held this status at all.

I’m sceptical of the argument that satire should “punch up” to be considered as such; after all, as people much more knowledgeable about the form than I have observed, there is a tradition of conservative satire that stretches back at least as far as Juvenal.  But I do believe that political satire should fundamentally sit in diametric opposition to that which it purports to critique.  In 2013 the novelist Jonathan Coe observed how, in an episode of Have I Got News For You from the late 90s, the probing questioning of one of the panel show’s team captains, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, was undercut by the funny quips of his opposite number, the improv comedian Paul Merton.  The comic tenor introduced by Merton, argued Coe, served to let off the hook the young politician – one Boris Johnson – who Hislop was grilling over accusations that he had tried to arrange an assault on a nosy journalist.  Johnson later guest hosted the show, and his (admittedly amusing) stints doing so have been widely credited with putting him in the public eye to the extent that he became a cult figure not just among politics-watchers but sections of the general public, a platform he has now ridden all the way to 10 Downing Street.  Ask yourself: if HIGNFY functioned remotely well as satire, would MPs be queueing up to appear on it?

The same goes for the recently resurrected puppet show Spitting Image, fondly remembered in the UK for its original run from 1984 to 1996, despite the fact that only about 10% of the sketches (if that) were actually funny.  It seems like the original crew at least realised that satire cannot become a national institution if it is to retain its power to skewer its targets; supposedly one member of the writing team realised the series was finished when Radio 1 DJ Chris Evans offered to voice his own puppet.  The relaunched Spitting Image – resurrected precisely because of this institutional status – seems not to have heeded this lesson, choosing to depict Johnson as a bumbling oaf: the exact same persona he himself has carefully constructed and used very cleverly to mask a hard-right politics that many people would have found much less palatable had it not come from someone so ostensibly charming and harmless.  Multiple members of the Cabinet tweeted their delight that the show had decided to immortalise them in puppet form: as with Have I Got News For You, it is clear that politicians, far from running scared of this kind of television, actually welcome the particular kind of consequence-free mockery that the new Spitting Image embodies.  As Juliet Jacques asks, how do you satirise people who are fundamentally unembarrassable in a country where most of the media shows no interest in holding them to account for their deleterious actions?

Gapecast dodges this question of co-optation in a number of ways.  Firstly, it’s made on a much smaller scale and disseminated to a much smaller audience.  I doubt its primary target even knows it exists.  Which is probably for the best, as the content is much more scabrous than the establishment satires of the BBC and ITV, frequently verging upon the mean-spirited.  The writers-cum-performers have no interest whatsoever in trying to humanise Mike Gapes, and the show, with its monstrous version of the former MP, can in one sense be characterised as a very elaborate act of revenge for his frequent robust anti-Left interventions during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.  More important, though, is the fact that, while outwardly avuncular and occasionally somewhat witty, Gapes absolutely cannot take a joke at the expense of himself or his hawkish neoliberal politics (as might be the case for you if your every online utterance was met with a tidal wave of people making jokes about milk).  If he started listening to Gapecast he’d call 999 by the end of the first episode, or at the very least fire off a series of tweets about “Trot scum”.  And this is, in my view, at least in part because he’d recognise the truth at the heart of the show’s bizarre portrayal of him.

In case you’re not familiar with UK politics, most seats in our parliament are considered unlikely to switch from one party to the other at any given general election.  What is more, there is no US-style primary mechanism whereby open challenges to incumbents from within their own party are a regular part of the system (and even the mere suggestion that local party members may be moving to deselect a disliked MP to prevent them from running again are invariably met with cries of “Stalinism!” from the media, at least when it’s the Labour Left trying to mount the challenge).  As such, if you get selected as your party’s candidate in the right constituency, being an MP is a job for life if you want it, and this applies in urban Labour seats like Ilford South just as much as it does in the safest Conservative rural boroughs.  Labour representatives in these areas, knowing that they have long since ceased to be accountable to ordinary voters on account of their party’s local dominance, and that they won’t be deselected as long as they don’t participate in outright criminal activity, are free to engage in all sorts of objectionable behaviour that runs counter to the stated aims and values of their movement.  Witness Birkenhead’s Frank Field, who spent 40 years engaging in the sort of socially conservative rhetoric with regard to single parents and “problem families” that was a bit hardline even for Tony Blair.  Witness Kate Hoey, Labour MP for Fox Hunting and Ulster Unionism.  Gapes, while not nearly as right-wing as these two, certainly felt sufficiently emboldened by his huge majority to spend a large proportion of the last five years working to undermine his own party’s leader and wreck Labour’s chances of getting elected, even going so far as to publicly quit the organisation in the end.  To quote the football manager Alan Pardew, “when you’re the king you can do anything”.

The fictional Gapes’ character alters from episode to episode depending on the needs of the plot, lurching from almost Illuminatus-like political operator to the Napoleon of Crime to the kind of mad, power-drained monarch you find in the worlds of the Dark Souls games, but the multifarious facets of his persona are all united by an outsize ego that there is much evidence to suggest his real-life counterpart shares.  Gapes Prime is forever at great pains to affirm that the result in Ilford South in the 2017 general election, in which his majority increased from 19,777 to 31,647, was not down to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour significantly outperforming expectations in England – and particularly in London – but arose from the great personal mandate he enjoyed as a result of his many years as a hard-working and effective representative of the local community.  (Strangely, many of the same MPs who made this argument at the time were only too pleased to lay the blame for the mass loss of Labour seats in the north of England two years later at the feet of Corbyn and Corbyn alone.  Curious.)  In Gapecast, Michael John Gapes is not just a respected politician who enjoys the love and admiration of his constituents but a venal tyrant who would make the Medicis blush, living in opulence at the “MP’s Mansion” and enjoying the services of a murderous gang known as the Gape Goons who act as a kind of secret police on his behalf.  In the hands of FFF and Frayne-Reid, Ilford South, which only exists in real life as an artificial boundary demarcation for the purposes of elections, becomes its own fiefdom distinct from the rest of London.  The alternate reality of the show, which started airing after the 2019 general election in which Gapes, having quit the Labour Party, lost his seat with 7.3% of the vote (proving that his personal mandate was maybe not quite as strong as he thought), sees its star remaining as MP-for-life, a crazed dictator ruling a decaying, dystopian city-state.  Gapecast’s protagonist ultimately functions as a symbol of a broken politics in which accountability for MPs in safe seats is distinctly optional.  The show, by literalising the petty kingdom one such figure constructed around his own monumental self-regard during his tenure in the House of Commons, performs a vital service in pricking the pomposity of such politicians who – as Gapes’ trouncing in 2019 demonstrates – would be absolutely nothing without a red rosette pinned to their chests and the party machine behind them.

The formal elements of Gapecast do much to buttress the carnivalesque, outrageous nature of its setting, lead character and humour.  Political comedy in the UK has tended to fall into a few staid categories: sketch- and impression-based revues like Spitting Image, the panel show (viz. Have I Got News For You), the sitcom set in the corridors of power (Yes, Minister and The Thick of It), and standup sets that tend to devolve into lamely earnest hectoring when not delivered with the obvious passion and ideological commitment of an Alexei Sayle or a Josie Long.  Gapecast’s form, however, is simply uncategorisable.  Each episode is structurally, tonally and thematically different from the last, often offering a sustained pastiche of an existing work (well-known or obscure).  A cooking show parody might be followed by a repurposed version of Bob Dylan’s sixteen-minute epic about the JFK assassination, “Murder Most Foul” (sung, of course, in the voice of Mike Gapes).  You could just as easily stumble across a Guy Ritchie-style East End gangster caper as a farcical story that recalls Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, in which Richard Miller and Jimothy Baker (who have exactly the same voice, owing to FFF’s self-admitted inability to do accents) get into all sorts of misunderstandings with Gapes and his body double, Kevin Narrows.  For my money, the show’s peak of invention and mirth is “Gapefest: A Weekend of Music and Milk”: a three-part mockumentary presented by Baker, which details the events that transpire when Gapes’ self-titled music festival in Ilford South descends into a maelstrom of bad tribute acts, illegal data harvesting, Altamont-style violence, fire, drugs, death and, most nightmarishly of all, a five-hour Jimmy Buffett headline set.  Some extended riffs do risk becoming impenetrable for those not fully au fait with Left Twitter running gags, who might consequently not be aware of the milquetoast Guardian columnist Rafael Behr’s 2006 musings on why shoes aren’t shaped like feet (which form the core of Episode 15), but this denseness and allusive fictioneering is as integral a part of the Gapeverse as the habitually menacing soundscapes Frayne-Reid weaves into the final edit.

Indeed, this fictional world is so vast that at times it has seeped out into our reality.  Twitter accounts purporting to be Richard Miller and Jimothy Baker have existed at one time or another, and a series of in-character tweets in which Miller claimed to be performing a spot of postal vote fraud on behalf of his boss even made it to a Daily Mail video in which the former Channel 4 journalist Michael Crick questioned Gapes about the provenance of these claims.  Hilariously, not only did the video’s screenshots of the offending tweets pixelate the face of “Miller” to preserve his privacy, but if you watch the footage you can see that Crick doesn’t appear at first to completely buy Gapes’ explanation that the account wasn’t associated with his campaign.  (The Richard Miller account was subsequently banned, which you really have to say was fair enough.)  This just goes to show that, for all that the big movers and shakers within politics and the media claim to be able to spot “fake news” when they see it, they don’t seem to be very good at telling when people are having them on.  Last year, in a particularly on-the-nose example of the new political humour devouring the old guard, Have I Got News For You itself was hoodwinked by a tweet from the official account of fictional football club Streatham Rovers (run by the pioneering parafictioneer Trevor Bastard), complaining that the opposition had numbered their team’s shirts so that, when ordered from 1 to 11, the first letters of their names spelled out “SRFC ARE SHIT”.  HIGNFY’s writers not only failed to recognise this as a joke but included a segment laughing at this apparent chicanery within an episode of the show.  One can only assume that the concept of an expanded universe centred around an imaginary non-league football team and incorporating numerous (equally fictional) Twitter personalities of varying political bents would simply not occur to the average panel show grunt, focused as they are on one-liners about how Diane Abbott can’t count and Boris Johnson’s hair is silly.

And really, this is why comedy like Gapecast does such a good job of assailing its targets.  We live in an age in which it is becoming increasingly clear that the intertwined media and political ecosystems are corrupted beyond repair.  Not only does the Conservative Party control the levers of government, aided by its Fleet Street friends, but it is increasingly seeking – despite all its pious claims to support “free speech” – to circumscribe the limits of acceptable discourse.  It is abetted in this by a Labour Party once again firmly in the hands of its centrist wing and consequently terrified of appearing remotely radical or unpatriotic; the irony is that if Mike Gapes had just hung on for a few more months of Corbyn’s leadership and not quit, he’d still be the unassailable incumbent MP his fictionalised counterpart in Gapecast is.  Politicians within this climate are happy to suffer the mild ridicule of a Spitting Image or Have I Got News For You because these forms of mockery are accepted parts of the national discourse, and their tame, scripted barbs are as nothing compared with the iron grip the political right enjoys on the discourse as a whole.  Just as Tom Whyman has argued that bombarding the replies of professional right-wing contrarian Brendan O’Neill with absurd photoshops of his massive forehead are in fact the perfect response to his nonsense, in that they refuse to give him the rise he is clearly looking for and instead paint him as someone literally unworthy of your respect or mental effort, the grotesque, offensive, formally experimental and genuinely original Gapecast makes clear that the best way to damage pompous political panjandrums through humour is by refusing to do so not only on their terms but on the commonly delimited terms of satire itself.

The UK is a One Party State

I’ve been thinking about Singapore a lot.  More than usual.  Partly it’s because I’ve recently been learning more about the local wrestling scene there, but mostly it’s because they had a general election last month, and as an amateur psephologist (i.e. a big election nerd) I’m always interested in stuff like that.  One of the key stories of the poll was whether the opposition would be able to make a breakthrough.  And they did!  The centre-left Workers’ Party, led by Pritam Singh, managed to capture a whole 10 seats in the 93-member Parliament of Singapore.  This represents the highest number of seats won by any opposition party since the country’s expulsion from the Malaysian Federation in 1965.  See, progress!

So what’s going on here?  You might look at the above paragraph and call Singapore a dictatorship, but the reality is more complex and a lot more interesting than that.  The centre-right People’s Action Party (PAP) has remained virtually unchallenged since 1959 not just because of its record in government (which can be characterised as increasingly mixed in recent years), but by way of a plethora of political, juridical, financial and discursive means that serve to entrench its power and stack the deck against opposition candidates and parties.

To begin with, the electoral system is an unusual one.  The island is divided into Single Member Constituences (SMCs) – which will be familiar to my British readers – and Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) where each party runs a “team” of 4 or 5 candidates (depending on the area), and whichever party receives the most votes has all their candidates elected.  It doesn’t matter how tight the margin of victory is; if you receive 49.9% of the vote and the other lot get 50.1%, then I’m afraid all of their guys are going to parliament, and all of yours are going back to their day jobs.  As you can imagine, this has tended to inflate the PAP’s parliamentary majority out of all proportion to its actual vote share (though I am duty-bound to point out that there are examples of a similar thing happening in a regular all-SMC system, as in the 2015 United Kingdom general election, where the Scottish National Party (SNP) earned 50% of the vote in Scotland and won 56 out of 59 seats).  Knowing that if multiple teams ran against the PAP in these constituencies the government would sweep the board every single time, the Singaporean opposition parties observe an agreement whereby only one puts itself forward in each GRC, thus creating the best chance of defeating the PAP slate.  Even then, the PAP has other weapons at its disposal.

By law, election campaigns in Singapore run for a maximum of nine days, which gives opposition parties very little time to build momentum and to get their messages out their to a public which usually has very little opportunity to hear what they have to say (imagine the massacre the Labour Party, trailing badly in the polls when campaigning for the 2017 UK general election began, would have faced if they’d had so narrow a window to convince the public that their policies were sensible and desirable).  As in the UK, candidates must pay a deposit to run for parliament, and will not have it returned if they fail to gain more than 5% of the vote in their constituency.  However, while in Britain you must fork out £500 for the privilege of seeking office, in Singapore the deposit is a fat S$13,500 (around £7,500).  One can’t help but feel that the intent is to discourage too much participation in democracy.  And if the PAP can’t hold the prospect of a crippling financial hit over would-be parliamentarians and their parties, they can empty their bank account once they’re elected.

Singapore has some pretty restrictive laws governing free speech (and governing everything, to be honest), and while officially the country’s MPs enjoy immunity from being prosecuted for anything they say in parliament – which in the UK memorably led to MP John Hemming breaking the terms of a court super-injunction to reveal that Premier League footballer Ryan Giggs had been cheating on his wife – the Parliament of Singapore itself has the power to judge whether its members have "abused this privilege".  This means, in effect, that the PAP can open the door for its opponents to be sued for defamation based on their political discourse.  This is what happened to J.B. Jeyaretnam, the Parliament of Singapore’s only opposition MP for a spell in the 1980s, who was a frequent target of civil defamation suits for statements made both outside and inside parliament – which Amnesty International branded “unreasonable restrictions on the right of Singaporeans to peacefully express their opinions and to participate freely in public life” in a 2000 statement – and eventually forced into bankruptcy.  As former Workers’ Party leader Low Thia Khiang colourfully put it, the PAP’s strategy can be summed up as “sue until your pants drop”.  Such strictures on opposition politicians’ speech remain common; in the most recent election Workers’ Party candidate Raeesah Khan was forced to apologise after two police reports were filed against her following the discovery of Facebook posts in which she alleged that police were biased against certain ethnic groups (her team was still elected in the Aljunied GRC).

In summation, the PAP enjoys a pre-eminent position in Singaporean politics not just because of its record in power and the benefits of incumbency as the only government any Singaporean under the age of 60 has known, but through a concatenation of factors present within the political sphere, the law and civil society, which serve to perpetuate its dominance and disadvantage opposition parties.  And yet Singapore is far from meeting the definition of an authoritarian regime.  It is not a free and fair democracy, but it is a democracy nonetheless.  The PAP does not rig elections as dictatorships do.  It has no need to.  So how to categorise such a system?

While doing a bit of reading following the election in Singapore last month, I chanced upon the term “dominant-party system”, which seems to describe the nation perfectly.  As distinct from a one-party state, a dominant-party system is one in which opposition parties are permitted to exist but one dominant party (hence the name) continually wins elections, and there seems little to no prospect of this changing in the future.  Working definitions of the dominant-party system vary, but tend to emphasise that a dominant party is: “uninterruptedly in government, either alone or as the senior partners of a coalition, for a long period of time” (Gary W. Cox); “[a] party which enjoys a preponderant influence in a given party system” (Hans Daalder); “ideologically dominant [and] capable of using government to shape public policy so that the nature of the state and the society over which it presides is fundamentally changed” (Brendan O’Leary), and “that which public opinion believes to be dominant” (Maurice Duverger).

The PAP – which evidently fulfils all of these criteria – appears in a list of dominant parties in the introduction to the Wikipedia article on the dominant-party system, along with United Russia, ZANU-PF, the African National Congress, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, Hungary’s Fidesz, the Awami League in Bangladesh, and Turkey’s Justice and Development Party.  Yet there is one political organisation notably absent from the article’s rather extensive list of dominant parties, and that is the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  Just as Singapore is not a one-party state but – in terms of who has a chance of governing – might as well be, I would like to argue that you can say the same for the United Kingdom at the present time; the deck is greatly stacked against the left just as surely as it is for the Workers’ Party in Singapore, and the sooner we recognise that fact the better.  To misquote Captain Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean, you best start believing in dominant-party systems; you're in one.

Let me be clear; I’m not arguing that our democracy is as (un)free as Singapore’s, nor that I would prefer to live under the PAP-dominated system.  What I am saying is that when I saw that the Conservative Party was mentioned nowhere in that Wikipedia article, I was genuinely shocked; particularly as one of the parties mentioned, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has been out of power more recently than the Tories have (2012 as opposed to 2010).  Going through the above definitions of a dominant-party system one by one, we can see how the Conservatives, where the UK is concerned, occupy much the same dominant position as the PAP.

Firstly, let us consider Cox’s definition of a dominant party as “uninterruptedly in government, either alone or as the senior partners of a coalition, for a long period of time”.  Cox suggests that this “long period of time” should be “three to five decades”, but as Patrick Dunleavy argues, “[e]mpiricist definitions of ‘dominant party systems’ incorporating ‘longitudinal’ time requirements risk tautology and create unacceptable lags in recognizing dominance.”  Instead, he advocates for “an analytic definition that can identify parties as dominant independently from their tenure of office”.  This not only cautions against defining dominance purely through tenure – it would be ludicrous to say that the Conservative Party in 1996, approaching two decades in office, was a dominant party when it was so clearly set to be annihilated at the next election – but allows us to consider kinds of dominant-party system other than ones where a party has remained in government for upwards of 30 years uninterrupted.

Dominant parties can suffer reversals, spend a brief amount time out of office and come back just as strong as before at the next election as voters, disillusioned with the former opposition’s time in government, return to what they’re used to (the LDP fell from 296 seats out of 480 in the Japanese House of Representatives in 2005 to 119 seats four years later, only to see 294 candidates elected in 2012).  Additionally, while one dominant party can replace another over a long period of time – in 1984 the Indian National Congress won 414 out of the 541 seats in the Lok Sabha, but now has just 52 MPs while the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has 303 – parties can rise from the margins to become dominant over a very short period of time.  As mentioned above, the SNP won 56 out of 59 Scottish seats in the United Kingdom House of Commons in 2015, yet at the previous election had just 6 MPs (the stark and very unexpected difference can in large part be attributed to nationalist anger following the No vote in 2014’s Scottish independence referendum – and the UK government’s high-handed manner towards Scotland in the year hence – coalescing support around the SNP, as well as its anti-austerity message).  With that in mind, it certainly isn’t inconsistent to term 2020’s Conservative Party the dominant party in a dominant-party system, even though it has only governed with an absolute majority for 3 out of the past 23 years.  After all, the conditions for the Tories to become truly dominant electorally to the same extent as the PAP, while they have only recently borne fruit, have been taking shape for a very long time.

Which brings us to Daalder’s statement that a dominant party is one which “enjoys a preponderant influence in a given party system”; not only do they dominate the elections, they dominate the system under which they are conducted and the discursive sphere through which the public comes to understand politics and appraise the fitness for office of political parties.  Nowhere is this more apparent in the UK than in print media.  The vast majority of daily newspapers essentially function as propaganda on behalf of the governing Conservative Party, with only the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror, milquetoast liberalism of the Guardian and centrist clickbait of the Independent bucking the norm.  The BBC, meanwhile, seems to have been utterly cowed by a combination of now having a significant presence of government appointees on its board (an innovation of former Tory PM David Cameron) and the ever-present threat of licence fee removal and subsequent privatisation.  As such, the officially neutral state broadcaster has increasingly proven itself unwilling to interrogate government narratives or to highlight opposition ones, with the result that reporters and editors have regurgitated Tory lies without bothering to check their veracity and, in a bizarre recent nadir, went so far as to depict Conservative Chancellor Rishi Sunak as Superman.

This Tory-dominated media class, as has been noted by many on the left, seems less interested in holding the government to account than holding the public to account for criticising the government (or agitating for progressive politics in general).  As such, you can sit there in the Question Time audience, pink-faced and frothing with rage, demanding that the leader of the opposition commits to vaporising thousands of innocent Iranian civilians with nuclear weapons if the need arises, and the worst that will happen is that Twitter wags will make memes of you and call you a “gammon” (after which right-wing talking heads will defend you on the grounds that calling you a gammon is an example of classism and racism, two subjects which they have never previously pretended to give a flying fuck about).  However, if you dare to ask the Conservative panellist a difficult question on the same programme then the ghouls at right-wing blog Guido Fawkes – run by Paul Staines, a self-professed Pinochet admirer who proposed an alliance with the far-right British National Party while a Tory student leader – will trawl through your entire social media history and get you suspended from your job for a very obviously sarcastic tweet saying that “Hitler’s abuse of the term nationalism […] is the most toxic part of his legacy” (a sentiment with which I’d have assumed the aptly-named Mr Staines would agree).  And woe betide you if, as the worried father of a sick child on an NHS ward, you believe that you have the right to give the Conservative Prime Minister a piece of your mind regarding hospital underfunding while at the same time being a member of the Labour Party; contrarians with massive foreheads will call your emotional intervention “a political act” and “a campaigning stunt”, and the Political Editor of the BBC will doxx you to her 1,200,000 followers.

And while the speech of left-wing activists in the UK is much less free than their right-wing counterparts, that goes for opposition politicians too.  I remember shaking my head at the Raeesah Khan story I mentioned above; why should someone have to apologise, I thought, much less face legal ramifications, for alleging that the police discriminate on the grounds of race?  How unfree Singapore is.  But now I see the monstering – both online and in newsprint – that the Black Labour MP Dawn Butler has received this month for having the temerity to suggest that the Metropolitan Police might not be completely above reproach in this regard, and I wonder how different the two situations really are.  In both cases, female MPs of ethnic minority backgrounds have been punished for speaking up about racial injustice.  This comes off the back of Butler having been forced to close her constituency office after racist threats and violence against premises and staffers: a blatant suppression of political activity about which the self-styled free speech warriors – your Brendan O’Neills and Toby Youngs – have stayed curiously silent, as have the Tory press in general.  She should have gone full transphobe on Twitter, like J.K. Rowling did.  Maybe she could have got an open letter defending her right to free speech too.

This is the reason a large group of Twitter leftists react to any opinion poll showing Labour behind the Tories by posting something along the lines of “Any competent leader would be 20 points ahead of the worst government in history.  Starmer must resign”: to mock all those people who were saying this in complete earnest while Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party.  (Don’t believe me?  Here’s a certain Mr T. Blair.)  It was an absolutely ludicrous argument, as has been borne out by Labour having never been even a single point ahead in the opinion polls since Keir Starmer – a man who presumably meets the definition of a “competent leader” by the standards of the Corbynsceptics – took over.  Calling the Conservatives “the worst government in history” (based on their handling of Brexit, Universal Credit or whatever else) was one thing, but stating that Labour should therefore be trouncing them in the polls fundamentally failed to reckon with the huge advantages in public perception the media’s extremely right-wing bias allows the Tories to enjoy, especially when set against Labour and Corbyn, who the press never missed an opportunity to call a Marxist, terrorist supporter, anti-Semite and much more besides.  Such is the nature of the dominant-party system.  Ask yourself: would you look at a foreign country where the national newspapers are almost all controlled by owners loyal to the governing party and who toe the party line almost to the letter, and conclude – even if you do not believe the government of that country to be doing “a good job” of governing – that the opposition have failed if they are not 20 points ahead in the polls?  It’s like blaming Alexei Navalny and Garry Kasparov for Putin still being in charge of Russia.

That’s why I have only ever said “Starmer should be 20 points ahead” in jest.  I may think Sir Keir is doing a crap job so far (and I do think it), but because I understand that the UK is a dominant-party system I would never state, as the intellectually dishonest Corbynsceptics did, that Labour would be topping the polls if only they had a better leader.  When I canvassed for Labour last year in Pudsey, a marginal Leave-voting seat eventually won by the Tories with an increased majority, I was essentially having to go door to door convincing people that everything they had read about the party and Jeremy Corbyn for the last 4 years in the newspapers and on Facebook was wrong.  You can appreciate that it was a tough ask, made even harder by Labour shooting itself in the foot by including in its manifesto the promise of a second EU referendum that not a single person I talked to – even those who had voted Remain – wanted.  While walking the streets of Pudsey I foolishly allowed myself to be heartened by the fact that I barely saw any Conservative posters in people’s windows, whichever part of town I was trawling.  It was just as the nice man at my Momentum meeting had told me; the Tories’ ground game was pathetic compared with ours.  But the simple truth I realised when the results came in on 12 December is that the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland could win a general election without canvassing a single voter, or even campaigning at all.  Why bother, when you have newspaper editors, opinion columnists, radio shock jocks and reactionary Twitter blue-ticks doing the hard work of getting your message across and delegitimising the opposition, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year?  I hate to break it to the Starmtroopers, but it isn’t going to get easier now you have a sensible lawyer in a suit to sell people, instead of a jam-making peace campaigner.

Ah, I’m sure you’re going to say, but weren’t Labour in an even more dominant position in 1997 than the Tories are now?  Were they not a dominant party?  To which my answer is “yes, on the face of it”.  Yet there’s a huge “but”.  It’s true that Labour’s gigantic 179-seat majority in 1997 (with a lead of quite a bit less than 20 points, incidentally) was far higher than the 80-seat majority the Conservatives won last year.  But to understand how dominance arises and is maintained, you have to look at what political parties do when they’re in advantageous positions.  Apparent dominance can be built on a foundation of sand.  To bring things back to wrestling, there used to be a company called World Championship Wrestling (WCW) that not only challenged the WWF’s status as the pre-eminent grappling purveyor in America, but actually supplanted it, with its weekly Monday night broadcasts beating WWF in the ratings 83 weeks in a row at one point.  In 1997 some estimates put the promotion’s value at as much as $500m.  Four years later WCW was dead, with WWF purchasing the trademark and tape library of their hated rival for a mere $4.2m.  The company had made the mistake of believing that the good times would never end, signing its ageing top stars to hugely lucrative contracts which also gave them creative control over how their characters were presented and effective vetoes over storylines that made them look weak, with the result that younger performers were never elevated to the point that they could be long-term replacements for the likes of Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage in the main event slot.  WCW also got into hugely wasteful habits financially, such as regularly flying all 160 contracted performers to TV tapings because the shows were often written at the last minute and the creative team didn’t know which wrestlers they’d need on hand, and paying soul legend James Brown $25,000 for an appearance that they failed to promote to prospective pay-per-view buyers in advance; the sort of thing you can get away with when business is booming, but not so much when it’s in terminal decline.  In short, WCW had mistaken a period of sustained supremacy over the WWF for entrenched dominance as a market leader.

Many political analysts made the same error when appraising New Labour’s position in the late 90s and 2000s, as – fatally – did many within New Labour itself.  I’m sure many people thought the Tories were completely dead and buried, especially in 2001 when they gained a princely 1 seat in a general election notable solely for Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott decking a farmer who threw an egg at him.  But Tony Blair’s main problem – well, besides waging a war in Iraq based on bogus intelligence that led to the deaths of over 100,000 civilians – was that he never attempted to build a party that, as O’Leary puts it, was “ideologically dominant [and] capable of using government to shape public policy so that the nature of the state and the society over which it preside[d] [was] fundamentally changed”.  For all Margaret Thatcher’s faults – and there were many – she presided over a government that fundamentally reshaped the social fabric of the United Kingdom: crushing trades unions, flogging council housing to private buyers and letting the tendrils of the free market inveigle their way into damn near every aspect of the nation’s economy.  Conversely, when New Labour came to power with a parliamentary majority that meant they could have passed virtually any legislation they wanted, they forfended to renationalise the industries Thatcher sold off – having loudly dropped the so-called Clause Four from the party’s constitution, which had promised to do so – and made no attempt to repeal the anti-union laws introduced by the Thatcher government.  This is why the furore from old New Labour hands when newly-elected MP Zarah Sultana used her maiden speech in the House of Commons to demand an end to “40 years of Thatcherism” seemed so utterly confected; after all, Blair himself has stated, “I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them” (I’ve already quoted the old Hague-dodger’s own words back at him once in this article, so why not do it again).  Indeed, Thatcher herself remarked in 2002, with great perceptiveness, that she considered Tony Blair and New Labour to be her greatest political achievement.  Such was the ideological dominance of the Tories of 1979-1990 that vast swathes of its dogma were accepted not just by the next Conservative administration but by the next Labour one too.

As such, New Labour’s claim to be a dominant party is deeply questionable, especially when we consider the nature of its decline and eventual ouster.  It enjoyed “a preponderant influence”, to use Daalder’s phrasing, amongst the media, orchestrated skilfully by Press Secretary and later Director of Communications Alastair Campbell, but the favour of traditionally Tory-supporting publications was only granted temporarily (and very much contingent on Blair’s aforementioned unwillingness to depart too far from Thatcherism).  As soon as New Labour outlived its usefulness to the press barons, newspapers reverted to supporting the Conservatives (see the Sun’s memorable “Labour’s Lost It” front page).  All that buttering up of the right-wing press did nothing to create lasting dominance.  And, like World Championship Wrestling, the party sowed the seeds of its own demise.  As much as Blairites like to blame Corbyn’s far-left agenda for the loss of a swathe of Leave-voting seats in northern England (the so-called “red wall”), and as much as Corbynistas are more likely to lay the blame at the feet of the continuity Remainers – including Keir Starmer – who pushed so forcefully for the suicidal second referendum policy, the reality is that the rot had set in in such regions long before these men rose to prominence in Labour.  To take one example, Bishop Auckland, won by the Tories for the first time in 2019, had a Labour majority of 21,064 in 1997, but by 2010 this had fallen to 5,218.  New Labour created precious little in the way of meaningful work in deprived northern areas to replace the mining industries decimated by the Thatcher government, relying instead on casual call centre jobs and crumbs from the table of the booming financial services industry in London, and a string of Labour councils, scarred by memories of internal battles against the Trotskyist-led Liverpool administration that resisted Tory cuts in the 1980s, pushed through stringent austerity measures following the 2008 financial crash.  Similarly, the national party meekly accepted the Conservatives’ successful attempt – abetted by the same newspapers that had been trumpeting Tony Blair’s virtues not so long ago – to paint the UK’s recession as a result of government overspending rather than a crisis of global capitalism.  New Labour’s biggest achievements – the minimum wage aside, which can be said to have become a truly dominant ideology – were consequently swept away by a Conservative Party that had never abandoned the Thatcherite ideal of small government.  What kind of dominance is it that is so easily reversed?

So now we come, finally, to our last criterium by which a dominant party is defined: a party which is simply, in Duverger’s words, “that which public opinion believes to be dominant”.  I think the preceding few thousand words have made clear the extent to which small-c and big-C conservative ideology completely suffuses the UK’s politics right now, and I would put it to you that only absolute wingnuts think anything different.  I mean, imagine how right-wing you would have to be to look at an 80-seat Tory majority, a populace of which almost 50% willingly admit to having little to no sympathy for destitute refugees crossing the English Channel, a media class which seems to regard even the most minor expressions of “wokeness” as akin to a new Spanish Inquisition, a public sphere in which a prominent newspaper columnist and wife of a current cabinet minister feels empowered to tweet a photo of their shared bookcase including a history book by convicted Holocaust denier David Irving and a now-debunked pseudo-scientific tome which purports to “prove” that black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, and come to the conclusion that the left controls all levers of power throughout the country and its institutions.  (As it turns out, exactly as right-wing as Peter Hitchens.)  And if you still aren’t convinced, take a look at the opinion polls that have been released during the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the Conservative government caused the preventable deaths of tens of thousands people who would still be alive if they’d locked down one week earlier, and seemed at once point to be more than ready to let the disease spread through the population unchecked, letting 250,000 people die to protect the economy.  Is Labour in the lead?  By 20 points?  By 1 point?  No, it isn’t.  The Tories are more popular, and it’s not even close.

It’s staggering how little negative impact the government’s (mis)management of the pandemic has had on its ratings.  But this is what happens in a dominant-party system.  A system where the government enjoys a “preponderant influence” on a media that seems more interested in slavishly defending the ruling party than scrutinising it; look at Evening Standard columnist and Times Radio presenter Ayesha Hazarika’s now-infamous “hipster analysis” tweet – somehow still not deleted – in which she decried the public’s insistence on wanting to know the rationale for not locking down (concerns which I would say were extremely well-founded, in the light of all the deaths and what have you).  As for “ideological influence”, you only have to look at the sheer spinelessness of Keir Starmer in opposing the government to see that, just as Blairism worked within Thatcherism’s new status quo rather than dismantling it, Labour seems to have decided on a policy of “constructive opposition” that looks more like critical support, and not just where COVID-19 is concerned.  From taking to the pages of the right-wing Mail on Sunday to demand that the Conservatives enact a policy they have already declared they are in favour of, to taking the knee in symbolic support of the Black Lives Matter movement before announcing his disagreement with all of its political goals, to standing by while his party takes a step back from advocating trans rights (an issue Corbyn’s Labour wasn’t even particularly good on to begin with), it seems there are no lengths to which the Labour leader will not go in order to signal his party’s acceptance of the paradigm the now-dominant Tories have created.  I hope it works out for you, mate.  Good luck winning a majority once the press turns on you, the leftists you’ve alienated go back to voting for the Greens or the TUSC or no-one at all, the Conservative voters you’re trying to woo decide they’d rather have the real McCoy than a watered-down version of Boris Johnson’s programme, the Leavers in the red wall remember that you were the guy who tried to take Brexit away from them, and your chances of winning back Scotland further recede into the ether.  And don’t assume the canvassers with whom I froze my arse off pounding the doorsteps last year are going to want to repeat their efforts on your behalf.  Not that it'll make any difference if they do.

I’ll say this for conservatives; they know how to build dominant parties.  Whether it’s the Republicans in the USA trying brazenly to gerrymander their way to endless rule, the Conservatives making sure that austerity measures fall most severely upon the shoulders of deprived areas with Labour councils (who can then take the blame on election day), or the PAP’s wielding of every weapon at its disposal to prevent Singapore’s opposition parties from gaining momentum, right-wingers understand at a fundamental level that governments have the power to dictate how the political game is played in the future.  It’s something that liberals, with their naïve faith in due process and their belief that conservatives and the media moguls who cheerlead for them can be mollified on a long-term basis, are yet to grasp.  The consequences, within my country’s context, are plain to see.  Despite what I stated in this article’s provocative and ultimately inaccurate title, the United Kingdom is not a one-party state, but it might as well be.  I hope to see Labour in power again: even Starmer’s Labour, which, notwithstanding all my critiques, would be an improvement on the current mob.  But from where I’m standing right now, there’s just as little chance of another Labour government in my lifetime as there is of dear Mr Pritam Singh becoming Prime Minister of Singapore.

So what are we going to do about this?  How are we going to advance leftist ideals if the Labour Party isn’t getting a sniff of power ever again?  How are we going to fight the Tories?  Well, you’re a smart person.  You’ll figure it out.

Dominic Cummings is an Asshole, Don’t Be an Asshole Like Dominic Cummings: A Philosophical Essay

It has long been my contention that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a nation possessed of a significant number of little Hitlers for whom the only thing they love more than imposing rules on people is breaking rules they think shouldn’t apply to them.  Now this may seem axiomatic to a lot of you, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about increasingly frequently since the 2019 general election, and the current COVID-19 crisis has only exacerbated this feeling.  While most people have obeyed lockdown rules for the greater good of public health, others have, to be blunt, taken the piss (with the Conservative government’s vague and ever-shifting advice providing a handy veil of plausible deniability in the case of my compatriots who seem to believe that possibly transmitting the virus to other human beings and killing them is an acceptable risk to take in the name of enjoying a day out at the beach).  And of those who have accepted the reality and necessity of being locked down, there would seem to be a direct correlation between their levels of resentment and time spent grassing their neighbours up on social media for daring to be outside, with no thought given to whether they might simply be taking their legally-mandated daily walk around the block, rather than being on their way to stand outside a garden centre coughing on the customers.  As an asthmatic with an immunosuppressed partner, I realise the importance of enforcing social distancing to stop the spread of COVID-19 more than most, but there are clearly a number of Brits out there who are clearly relishing the chance to act as self-appointed lockdown police.  Not for nothing did the comedian Stewart Lee describe Twitter as “a state surveillance agency run by gullible volunteers”.

It’s this resentment that I want to talk about in light of recent revelations concerning Dominic Cummings (special advisor to Prime Minister and thinking person’s moron Boris Johnson), his apparent two trips up to County Durham last month in clear violation of lockdown laws, and the extent to which this makes him an asshole.  Now, to be clear, I’m not using the word “asshole” as a subjective pejorative term based on the man’s hard-right politics.  Sure, he ran an abusive anonymous Twitter account with the aim of venomously smearing opponents of then-Education Secretary Michael “Tesco Value Slappy the Dummy” Gove, he helmed a Vote Leave campaign which weaponised and exacerbated rank xenophobia, and he seems to have a worrying interest in eugenics, but while I might (and do) call him an asshole for this, if you were a committed Tory you might say that these were not the actions of an asshole but of a patriot who uses robust methods to gain desirous outcomes for his country.  (You’d also be cordially invited to fuck off and stop reading this blog forever, but that’s beside the point.)  Rather, when I call Dominic Cummings an asshole I am doing so specifically in relation to his breaking lockdown, using the word as the moral philosopher Aaron James does in his brief, amusing 2012 treatise Assholes: A Theory.

The bulk of James’ book is concerned with attempting to construct a working definition of the asshole qua asshole.  This does not encompass genocidal monsters; as James explains, “There are not enough harsh names for these figures, and it is fine to add ‘asshole’ to the list.  But it would be deeply offensive to only call Hitler or Stalin an asshole; there are much more important ways to describe them morally.”  Rather, James concerns himself with “the mere asshole”, the kind of low-level irritant, jerk or boor you come across every day (at least when you’re not staying home to protect frontline health services).  He defines this kind of person as one who:

1) “allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically”;
2) “does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement” and
3) “is immunised by his sense of entitlement against the complains of other people”.

They are the driver who cuts you off on the motorway, or the shopper who doesn’t put the trolley back where they found it when leaving the supermarket.  In short, they believe themselves exempt from the rules that others are compelled to abide by; not just in terms of obeying the law, but fulfilling unwritten moral contracts governed by innate or socially constructed sense of “the right thing to do”.

It goes without saying that the asshole, as James has it, would not believe that it behoves them to observe lockdown regulations, and would be far too selfish to recognise as legitimate the argument that they should limit their own activities to protect others.  By this definition, Dominic Cummings, despite his argument that he drove 260 miles from London to County Durham to arrange childcare for his four-year-old son when he and his wife came down with COVID-19 symptoms, can be termed an asshole, because he put others at risk of infection.  He did so not only by almost certainly coming into contact with non-COVID-positive human beings in the course of his two journeys north, but by markedly undermining public confidence in the lockdown.  This undermining is especially risky for public health because of the presence in British society of a type of asshole that James’ book doesn’t cover: the person - usually white, middle-class and comfortably off - who believes they have a right to bend or break the rules not simply because they innately believe themselves entitled to “special advantages”, but because they feel, paradoxically, that they have earned this right because they are the sort of person who always follows the rules.

To elaborate on how people come to believe this, another philosophical detour seems in order, one that seems especially relevant considering we’re discussing a matter of state intervention in public health.  The philosopher Michel Foucault conceived “biopolitics” as the set of technologies - including statistical analysis, public health and education - by which governments seek to create a well-behaved and pliant population (which Foucault called a “superrace”) in order to engender efficient economic production and the orderly running of society.  Those who are perceived to resist this ordering, on account of actions, cultures and even genes which are deemed deviant, are considered a “subrace” from which governments determine the superrace needs to be protected.  For Foucault, race and racialisation are less about skin colour than a constantly shifting conjunction of infinitely variable biological and behavioural signifiers.

Other thinkers have sought to complicate Foucault’s distinction between superrace and subrace.  Taking a term from Roman law, Giorgio Agamben defines those who resist biopower’s ordering of the community as homo sacer (meaning “bare life”), suspended between bios and zoē: between superrace and subrace.  For Agamben, under regimes of biopower “the realm of bare life - which is originally situated at the margins of the political order - gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction”.  In short, they produce “a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being” that is placed into what Agamben calls a “state of exception [which] is neither external nor internal to the juridical order" of the biopolitical state.  As it proves consequently “impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from execution of the law, such that what violates a rule and what conforms to it coincide without any remainder”, the people the state constructs as homo sacer remain at its mercy, their legally uncertain status rendering them susceptible to all kinds of abuses.

It’s not so much in vogue as a way of conceiving technologies of political oppression as it used to be, but many thinkers earlier in the 21^st century found biopolitics very useful as a way of framing the categories and the logical contortions the architects of the War on Terror produced to justify its excesses (and, indeed, its very existence).  In 2002 Slavoj Žižek wrote of “the ‘unlawful combatant’, who is neither enemy soldier nor common criminal” as a form of bare life, and a year later Agamben himself noted the “immediately biopolitical significance of the state of exception as the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension emerges clearly in the ‘military order’ issued by the president of the United States on November 13, 2001, which authorised the ‘indefinite detention’ and trial by ‘military commissions’ (not to be confused with the military tribunals provided for by the law of war) of noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.”  This is not to say that states which are willing to circumscribe or mystify legal rights within carceral spaces will necessarily limit themselves to just that.  As François Debrix and Alexander Barder argue, “the virtual ‘real possibility’ of the exception (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib) may also seek to draw our attention towards the idea of a supposedly unique, unusual, extreme, or indeed ‘exceptional’ zone as if such a site were not the norm, or as if it were not supposed to be real or actualised anywhere else”.  That is, a state which creates a state of exception somewhere can and will do so everywhere if it considers it necessary.

So what does this have to do with your middle-class curtain-twitching lockdown enforcers, you might ask?  After all, insofar as the British state apparatus constructs homo sacer from the bodies present within the borders it administers – and it definitely does – it does not do so from among the “squeezed middle” or “just about managing”, to use two equally risible phrases coined by our nation’s two main political parties to describe the lower-middle class in the 2010s.  Rather, it does so in spaces like the Yarl’s Wood detention centre, and on the streets so many have been forced to make their home in the age of austerity.  However, never let it be said that the comfortably-off white British people with whom I am concerned lack the imagination to conceive the existence of people simultaneously bound by and detached from the law; more accurately, detached because they are bound.  Only, they do not imagine a homo sacer oppressed by this legal indistinction, but one that enjoys the right to be liberated by it.  And the identity of this pseudo-bare life is themselves.

Ours is a country whose national discourse is suffused simultaneously by a deep sense of superiority and a deep persecution complex, which leads the folks mentioned above to misappraise their standing in society in three main ways.  Firstly, you have those who like to imagine themselves as some kind of oppressed minority, because the PC brigade won’t let you push dog shit through the letterbox of the Asian family down the street anymore and are gifting honest working Britons’ taxes to house definitely-not-imaginary Somali asylum seekers in palatial Kensington estates.  Then there are the “what if I went to private school but had fuck all money throughout?” crew, the people who are convinced that because their lifestyle is typical amongst their social set and because they have little money left over every month because most of their salary is tied up in Porsche car loans/multiple mortgages on their buy-to-let empire/paying for their kids’ tennis lessons in an attempt to buy forgiveness for cheating on their mother with a work colleague, they are therefore nothing more or less than Average Joes.  By way of example, witness this frothing gammon steak confront my local MP on Question Time to declare that he, a man earning more than £80,000 per annum, was not in the top 50% of earners in the country (the UK median salary is just over £30,000).

Then you have the third kind: the assholes.  Specifically, the assholes who believe that their shining virtue in following the rules gives them the right to flout them, and to not be punished for flouting them (and, indeed, to not be considered to have flouted them at all) by dint of their being, at their very core, “the sort of person who always follows the rules”.  Now, we already know that your freedom to disobey laws, rules and conventions is largely dependent upon your class, race, gender and political alignment.  Contrast the wall-to-wall media coverage of mostly white Brits attending “socially distanced” (but clearly not actually socially distanced to anyone with eyes) VE Day street parties with the solemn advice issued to Muslims to observe the holy day of Eid ul-Fitr within the privacy of their own home.  Or consider the recent row wherein Sarah Vine, right-wing newspaper columnist and wife of cabinet minister Michael Gove, in an apparent attempt to rub her privilege in the faces of her “trolls”, tweeted a photo of their shared bookcase which included, amongst its many delights, a discredited tome by a “race scientist” which argued that black people are inherently less intelligent than whites, and a history book by a convicted Holocaust denier.  I know that playing the “can you imagine the media reaction if Jeremy Corbyn had done this thing that a Tory did?” game is incredibly futile, especially now he’s been replaced as leader of the Labour Party by a sentient necktie with a nice line in forensics and shafting the left, but come the fuck on.  Already widely castigated as an anti-Semite by the right-wing press (and much of the liberal media at that), he’d have been raked over the coals.  With regard to Dominic Cummings, the risible clown college known as the Daily Telegraph ran a piece yesterday by anti-immigration flange David Goodhart which argued that “There is a kind of hyper-democratic rancour abroad that refuses to contemplate that our rulers, at least while they are ruling, deserve some special treatment”, which I at least appreciate for saying the quiet part loud.  I could go on.

However, we’re specifically talking about the people who claim the right to defy rules not by dint of race, class, gender or political bent, but by their own lawfulness.  The British like to imagine themselves as people who go about their lives guided not only by the rule of law but by manners that are not codified in any statute but are followed because they are moral goods in and of themselves.  It’s how we get this fetishisation of good-natured queueing as an especially British trait, despite the fact that 1) foreigners seem perfectly able to do this as well even if they’ve never been to Hemel Hempstead, and 2) people in the UK have a capacity to become extraordinarily rude and irritable if the amount of time spent queueing is, say, 10% more than what was expected.  As such, many - especially those comfortably-off middle-class whites unused to being told “no” - feel entitled to a reward for doing things “the right way”.  You see it in the deployment of the phrase “otherwise law-abiding motorists”; as the argument goes, I pay my taxes on time, I’ve never stolen or committed assault, so why shouldn’t I be able to break the speed limit if I want to?  After all, I’m a model citizen, and I always obey the law.

It’s this dynamic which explains the ferocity of the reaction to Dominic Cummings’ breaking of lockdown by newspapers and commentators usually so slavish in their support of the Conservative Party (when the Spectator is calling for you to go, you done fucked up); newspapers and commentators enjoyed by vast swathes of the social group described above.  People who shrugged away or even celebrated existing double standards regarding rule-obeying and rule-breaking are up in arms because the expectation of reward inherent in the construction of the “otherwise law-abiding” pseudo-homo sacer has been violated.  Free speech absolutists in the Tory press who defended Sarah Vine’s right to own books by a Holocaust denier, knowing full well that the same freedom to own whatever books one desires is not necessarily possessed by others without the privilege of being employed by said Tory press - we might call these people “asshole enablers” - have suddenly discovered that “special advantages” are not acceptable when someone in power has wielded a perceived right (the right to defy lockdown for the sake of one’s family) that these enablers believed themselves unable to enjoy.  What an asshole, they think.  Was being an asshole an option all along for me as well?

Let me be clear what I am not arguing.  I am not calling ordinary people assholes for quite rightly wondering why Dominic Cummings is able to drive to County Durham with COVID-19 symptoms while they were forced to watch relatives’ funerals via Zoom.  Rather, it is precisely because they felt the pain of loss and of the unfairness of not being able to be there to hold their loved one’s hand as they slipped away, and then stayed home anyway, that they are not assholes.  There is nothing wrong with being angry that the platitudes of “we’re all in it together” issued by the Conservative Party were not true after all (as indeed, they were not true when David Cameron’s government was slashing public services to the bone in the name of “balancing the books”).  However, it is important that we do not react to the asshole behaviour of Dominic Cummings by becoming assholes ourselves.  “I guess I’ll just do whatever I want if this guy can” is not a helpful response to this outrageous behaviour, nor is it going to help us save lives.  There’s already enough people out there potentially spreading disease by refusing to socially distance, sometimes while complaining about people refusing to socially distance (“otherwise law-abiding plaguespreaders”).  And under our constantly changing “new normal” there’s already enough leeway for people to place themselves into a zone of “legal indistinction” (as Agamben might have it) in the name of their own freedom or convenience if they so desire.  Be “the sort of person who follows the rules” not because you expect it to earn you the right to disregard them when you so desire, or even because you wish yourself to be imbued with some nebulous moral virtue, but for the simple reward of saving another human being’s life.

Essentially, what I’m saying is that we need to be better than Dominic Cummings.  Based on his actions over the last few days, and the last few years, it isn’t hard.

Vinoo Mankad Was Right

In his book Playing Hardball, the former Test cricketer turned sportswriter (and baseball aficionado) Ed Smith writes: “Cricket is notoriously difficult to explain [to Americans], and I am only marginally more confident about clarifying the rules of baseball to the Brits.”  In my experience, the latter isn’t hugely difficult to achieve.  My parents might not have been able to tell a screwball from a sacrifice fly when we walked through the doors of the Citi Field stadium back in 2011 to see the New York Mets take on the San Diego Padres, but my mother was the first one on her feet when the Mets smacked the winning run at the bottom of the ninth, so she clearly had a good idea of what was going on.  I’ve not yet had an opportunity to give one of my friends from across the pond a crash course in cricket, but I don’t foresee any major issues.  How the sport works really isn’t hard to grasp when you get down to it.  Yes, there are dozens of fielding positions rather than the nine of baseball, but you don’t need to know all of their (mostly very stupid) names to identify when the captain has set an attacking field and when they are playing safety first.  Yes, there are ten ways to get out (it used to be eleven), but in practice only about half of them actually happen in games.  What’s much more difficult for non-fans to comprehend is the wider culture surrounding the sport, particularly how it relates to received notions of “fair play”.

The example I always use to illustrate this is Mankading, a technique named after the former Indian international Mulvantrai Himmatlal “Vinoo” Mankad.  Put simply, here’s what it entails.  As the bowler runs in to bowl, the batsman at the non-striker’s end almost always takes a few paces out of their crease, so as to gain a slight advantage in  they are called upon to run to the other end; the reasoning is that these few paces might make the difference between making your ground and being run out.  In 1947, Mankad hit upon the idea of simply stopping his runup and running the non-striker out once they had left their crease, a plan he successfully executed in the Second Test against Australia.  The Aussie media castigated Mankad for the practice – and coined the term “Mankading” in the process – but the Indian had his defenders, most notably the legendary batsman and then Australian captain, Don Bradman, who remarked in his autobiography:

“For the life of me, I can’t understand why [the press] questioned his sportsmanship.  The laws of cricket make it quite clear that the non-striker must keep within his ground until the ball has been delivered.  If not, why is the provision there which enables the bowler to run him out?  By backing up too far or too early, the non-striker is very obviously gaining an unfair advantage.”

Bradman is correct; Mankading is completely legal within the laws of the game.  Yet, because it is widely considered to be an unsportsmanlike act, you very, very rarely see it performed, and when you do it is invariably accompanied by an almighty media storm.  In the 2016 Under-19 World Cup, the West Indian team was labelled “absolutely disgraceful” by former New Zealand skipper Stephen Fleming after bowler Keemo Paul Mankaded the last batsman in a tightly-fought match against Zimbabwe, an action that sealed his team’s place in the quarter-finals.  On the other side of the coin, in 2003 Bangladesh passed up a clear opportunity to Mankad the star Pakistani player Inzamam ul-Haq, but declined.  Inzamam went on to make 138 not out, and Pakistan prevailed by one wicket.  Bangladesh, who at that point had never won a Test match, would have to wait another six years for their inaugural win.

Now, while I’ve never tried to teach the laws of cricket to an American, I have attempted to explain Mankading.  Without exception, my US friends have reacted with utter disbelief to the whole discourse.  The sport of bat and ball they are used to is baseball, which contains among its many intricacies a version of Mankading.  The pitcher, if they sense that the player on first base is attempting to steal a yard, is perfectly entitled, instead of trying to strike out the batter, to throw the ball to first base and try to tag the runner out.  They may do this as many times as they like, and sometimes you’ll see half a dozen attempts to run out the man on base before the ball even gets within spitting distance of a bat.  Catching batters stealing is part and parcel of the game; an occurrence so frequent as to be completely unremarkable.  The idea that a sports team would be so beholden to ideals of sportsmanlike behaviour that they wouldn’t use every means at their disposal to try and win a game is something my American friends find quite baffling.

All of which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Marcelo Bielsa.  At a press conference this afternoon the Leeds United manager, facing accusations that he had sent a spy to observe rivals Derby County conduct a training sessions, confounded predictions that he would either resign or offer an apology by not only confessing that he had engaged in this espionage but that he had dispatched a member of staff to observe every team Leeds have played so far this season.  He then – as if this wasn’t earth-shattering enough – fired up a PowerPoint presentation that detailed the frankly insane amount of detail gathered by him and team in preparation for the Derby game, right down to how many combined minutes their players have played in each position, and which secret hand signals correspond to which set piece routine.  Speaking with remarkable candour, Bielsa, who stated at the outset that he was confessing everything in order to help the Football League with their investigation into his behaviour, made several compelling points in his defence.  He explained that he had gained no advantage by doing this; his scouts, he stated, didn’t tell him anything his own meticulous analysis of games hadn’t revealed, and, at any rate, information on the opposition is useless if you can’t marshal your own team to take advantage.  He recounted one game during his tenure as Athletic Bilbao boss after which Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola had complimented him on how diligently he had prepared.  But for Bielsa “it was useless information because they scored three goals”.

He also hinted that he is not the only manager who engages in the practice, which I found incredibly gratifying, because the tenor of much of the criticism levelled at the manager after the initial allegations struck me as patronising and with a tangible xenophobic undercurrent.  A Match of the Day interviewer asked if he now understood that spying on other teams is not acceptable in this country, and more than one prominent pundit suggested that Bielsa would have to learn “how things are done” in the English Football League.  Even the manager’s own board threw him under the bus somewhat with a public statement asserting that Leeds United would “look to work with our head coach and his staff to remind them of the integrity and honesty which are the foundations that Leeds United is built on” (this from the club of Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter and Lee Bowyer).  To listen to these figures, you would be forgiven for wondering if we had moved on from twenty years ago, where vices such as diving and shirt-pulling were characterised as specifically foreign diseases, and a “reducer” to the legs of newly-arrived overseas players by a Vinnie Jones or a Julian Dicks or a Neil Ruddock was considered an acceptable way of nipping this sort of thing in the bud before it started.  None of this fancy Dan stuff, you’re in Blighty now, where men are real men and real men get unbelievably irate at vegan sausage rolls and shaving company adverts.  Meanwhile, you’d have been searching a long time to find an English pundit willing to argue that Michael Owen dived to win a crucial penalty against Argentina at the 2002 World Cup.  The Ricky Tomlinson film Mike Bassett: England Manager, released the previous year, brilliantly skewered these hypocrisies with a scene in which, against a fictional Argentinian outfit, mercurial midfielder Kevin Tonkinson produces a carbon copy of Diego Maradona’s notorious “Hand of God” goal to win the game, which is hailed by the English commentator as a “fantastic header”.

To act, in the Year of Our Lord 2019, as if footballing espionage was imported by Marcelo Bielsa from Buenos Aires this summer, is ludicrous.  On the latest edition of James Richardson’s excellent Totally Football Show podcast, one contributor related the very salient fact that many managers in England have, upon seeing that their club’s training ground was offering onlookers numerous vistas of its sights, ordered the planting of trees to obscure their practice drills from view.  Perhaps all these managers were reacting to utterly groundless fears, submitting to an almost Pynchonian paranoia.  Or perhaps it is as Bielsa and others have intimated, that spying is rife in English football, and the Leeds United manager has, like the boy who points out that the Emperor has no clothes, merely named what others are too unwilling or craven to admit.

And here’s the rub.  Spying is absolutely permissible within the rules set out by the Football League.  Bielsa, though he admits that “not everything that is legal is right to do”, has broken no rules.  He has been pronounced guilty, by those who have criticised him, of a type of Mankading.  The old Victorian ideal of sport as an arena not only for athletic endeavour but the display of moral probity, to which cricket seems especially beholden, clearly still holds sway in football too, despite everything.  The foreigner, moreover, is expected to abide by moral standards that by all accounts are not widely being followed by native-born Englishmen in the industry within which he works.  And it is precisely this promulgation of the notion that ours is a people uniquely characterised by fair play, our demanding that other nations follow rules by which we ourselves are only willing to abide for show – consider our repeated demands for special treatment within the EU both during and long before the Brexit negotiations – that is a chief reason many people in foreign countries quite rightly despise the English.

Hearteningly, the vast majority of the online reaction to Bielsa’s press conference has been very supportive, and not only from Leeds fans.  These is a widespread recognition that if Bielsa is guilty of anything it is being too honest about a practice many people in English football would rather wasn’t talked about, and being too anxious to make sure he has prepared as thoroughly as possible.  I’m sure many of them wish the clubs they support were lucky enough to have such a diligent manager.  And that’s a good thing.  I’m not completely instrumentalist in my approach to sport.  I recognise that there are certain things in football which, while legal, do nothing for the sport a spectacle; for example, keeping the ball in the corner to kill time, or mouthing off at the referee.  I have no time for a win-at-all-costs mentality.  However, going the extra mile to scout opponents – for that is all Bielsa has done – harms nothing of football’s essence, just as cricket would survive unscathed if Mankading became seen as a legitimate tactic and batsmen at the non-striker’s end have to start their runs later.  If anything, it raises the bar for English managers, who all too often get jobs through the old boys’ network or because they are a known quantity.  But as for the hypocrisy and petty xenophobia of the English, I have a feeling that no matter how many dossiers you might have Marcelo Bielsa prepare on the enemy, it will prove somewhat more difficult to defeat than Derby County.